Iran's President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad (l.) is received by Venezuela's President Hugo Chavez at the Miraflores presidential palace in Caracas, Venezuela, Monday. The two leaders, known for making inflammatory comments to provoke the US, joked yesterday about the possibility of Iranian nuclear weapons.

Mr. Ahmadinejad is visiting four Latin American countries this week to strengthen ties with its allies in the region after tougher US sanctions on Iran were announced on Dec. 31, The Associate Press reports. During his first stop in Venezuela yesterday, Ahmadinejad laughed alongside Mr. Chavez as he said a hill in front of the presidential palace would open to expose a nuclear weapon.

"The imperialist spokesmen say ... Ahmadinejad and I are going into the Miraflores (presidential palace) basement now to set our sights on Washington and launch cannons and missiles.... It's laughable,” Chavez said, according to the BBC.

Sadjapour warns that instability could have devastating consequences. There is "legitimate concern," he says, "that the hardliners in Tehran are purposely trying to provoke some type of a US or Israeli attack on Iran in order to repair Iran's deep internal fissures, both between a disgruntled population against the regime and amongst Iran's political elites themselves."

Sadjapour calls that a "trap" that the United States and Israel "should be very careful about walking into."

Since 2003, I don't know that there has been any evidence, at least in the public domain, of Iran taking measures to make a nuclear weapon. At least I have not seen any indication of that. But Iran certainly is making tremendous headway in developing a range of ballistic missiles that could threaten the cities throughout the Gulf and in Israel. That would include Turkey once this Sajjil- 2 , a two-stage system they are working on now reaches operational capacity.

That system has a range of approximately 2000 kilometers, though we're not really certain exactly what its maximum capacity is. Theoretically, it could threaten targets in the very southeastern corridor of Europe but there is no indication that they're developing that particular system to threaten Europe.”

"We say with clarity that we do not accept those sanctions," Ecuadorian Foreign Minister Ricardo Patino said. "We are a sovereign nation, we don't have dads punishing us and putting us in the corner for behaving badly. They [the US] should instead be sanctioning the US companies doing massive business in Tehran like Coca-Cola and Pepsi-Cola."